Virtual World Nearly Collapses for Tweeters after Twitter's Attacked by a Hacker

The virtual world for Tweeters came to a near standstill this morning.

Facebook and Twitter, two obscenely popular social networking Web sites, were attacked by a hacker about 6 a.m., which left the Twitter site down completely, and Facebook experiencing problems.

Twitter's status box says, "defending against a denial-of-service attack," which means a hacker directed countless computers to a single Web site, not allowing legitimate traffic to get through.

And just like that, nobody knew what Phoenix, or the world was having for breakfast today.

"Clearly they need a stronger infrastructure to be able to fight this kind of attack," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at computer security firm Sophos, tells the Associated Press. Cluley went on to say that because of the vast popularity and huge growth of Twitter, its tech support teams "must be frankly out of breath."

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Hold the phone... Somebody just "tweeted" that Twitter is back to normal. Now we can all take a collective sigh of relief, and tell each other what we're having for lunch.

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